A developer-first guide to harnessing the full power of PostgreSQL. Stop treating Postgres like a dumb storage bucket and start using it as the powerful data platform it was designed to be.
Sponsored by Stackaura
Demystifying databases and backend architecture for modern engineering teams.
Most web developers interact with Postgres exclusively through an ORM (Prisma, TypeORM, ActiveRecord). While ORMs are great for velocity, they abstract away the most powerful features of Postgres, leading to N+1 queries, slow performance, and convoluted application code for things the database could do in milliseconds.
This repository is your guide to pushing logic down to the database where it belongs.
Postgres is an incredible NoSQL database.
- Querying deep JSON structures efficiently
- Creating GIN indexes on JSONB columns
- Updating specific keys within a JSON blob
You might not need ElasticSearch or Algolia just yet.
- Setting up
tsvectorandtsquery - Handling typos with trigram extensions (
pg_trgm) - Ranking search results based on relevance
Stop your data from becoming corrupted under load.
- Optimistic vs. Pessimistic concurrency control
SELECT ... FOR UPDATEstrategies- Understanding isolation levels (Read Committed vs. Serializable)
Securing data at the lowest level.
- Setting up multi-tenant architectures perfectly
- Writing RLS policies for Supabase/PostgREST
- Bypassing policies safely for admin tasks
- Reading an execution plan without getting a headache
- Identifying missing indexes
- Understanding seq scans, index scans, and bitmap heap scans
Every concept comes with a practical schema.sql and queries.sql file.
Example: Finding similar text using trigrams:
-- Enable the extension
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_trgm;
-- Create an index for fast similarity searches
CREATE INDEX idx_products_name_trgm ON products USING GIN (name gin_trgm_ops);
-- Find products similar to 'ipone'
SELECT name, similarity(name, 'ipone') as sml
FROM products
WHERE name % 'ipone'
ORDER BY sml DESC
LIMIT 5;Are you a Postgres wizard? We want your obscure performance tips and clever architectural designs!
- Fork the repository
- Add your example to the relevant section (or create a new one)
- Ensure the SQL is tested and well-commented
- Submit a PR
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
Maintained and optimized by the team at Stackaura.
